Check it out: In just one and a half minutes, here's
everything that's working on Marvel's
Agents of SHIELD, along with everything that's not. Just in time for the
midseason break, which is a good moment to appraise this show's progress.

Spoilers ahead...

So in case videos are disabled where you are, the above clip
features Melinda May having two confrontations: first with Grant Ward, the
chisel-jawed agent that she's been sleeping with on the down-low. Grant took a
punch for her in the recent battle, and she's worried his feelings are clouding
his judgment — but he sets her straight, and then it appears that she has
feelings of her own.

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And then Skye shows up and has one of several confrontations
in this episode with Melinda about Skye's search for her mysterious parents,
which Melinda is supposed to be helping Skye with. Melinda is hiding something
secret from Skye, and here she almost
comes out and reveals the truth. But instead, she bitches Skye out about not
focusing on the Mission, and Skye runs away in tears.

So this, then, is SHIELD at its best and at its worst: a
crisp drama about professional spies who are uber-competent in the field but
have torrid hookups and tawdry relationships. You could almost mistake it for a
scene from The CW's Nikita. And then,
a soap opera about people searching for secrets from their pasts, and unable to
deal with the emotions and the lies and everything.

It's not just that Skye is still a character who feels oddly
misplaced and unsympathetic — it's that none of the secrets the show keeps
teasing us with are that fascinating. And they arguably don't mesh that well
with the notion of "superspies on a plane fighting high-tech
menaces."

In the meantime, this was also the episode that the season's
over-arching plot kicked into high gear, and we discovered more about our big
bad, in an adventure that I'm calling "The Deadly Menace of the Three
Guys."

The Deadly Menace of
the Three Guys

So basically, there are these three guys, who are
supersoldiers with the centipede gear implantsed into their bodies, same as
what Mike Peterson (J. August Richards) had in the pilot. They break into a prison,
and break out an ex-marine tactical expert named Edison Poe, whom we met
briefly in a previous episode. Poe is in league with Raina, the femme fatale
who's been finding test subjects for the centipede implants and the Extremis
tech. And they're both working for/with a mysterious guy named the Clairvoyant.

So the SHIELD gang recruits Mike, who has been training to
work for SHIELD ever since he almost blew up a train station in the pilot. Mike
feels really bad about his behavior when he was under the influence of the
implants, so bad that he hasn't visited his own son since then. And the gang
goes out of its way to make him feel worse — when they're not objectifying him
weirdly in the lab.

Mike's arc in this episode is sort of weird — he wasn't in
control of himself when he was being a "monster" in the first
episode, so it's no different than someone being under the control of an alien
artifact. But people keep scowling at him, and Coulson says he's getting a
second chance but won't get a third one. And after Mike gets himself stabbed by
one of the Three Guys, everybody exaggeratedly pats him on the back and says
he's gone above and beyond. It's all a little weirdly condescending, especially
considering Mike did nothing wrong.

It's actually a relief when Mike does go off the rails —
the bad guys kidnap his son Ace, and demand Mike exchange himself for his son. But
in fact, it's a trick and they actually want Coulson. And Mike goes along with
this, for his son's sake, but then has second thoughts and runs after them once
his son is safe. And then... he gets blown up and apparently killed. Which,
I'll be really pissed if Mike is actually dead, especially after the way he was
treated in this episode.

In any case, we learned a bit more about the conspiracy this
time around — the centipede guys are also the same people who put the eye
implant in that one SHIELD agent several episodes ago, and used it to control
her. They've been experimenting with supersoldier tech, but also Extremis, and surveillance/control
implants. And the key to their organization is the mysterious Clairvoyant, who
doesn't like to be touched and who is so mysterious that women who see him have
to lose their eyes.

Oh, and the secret organization behind the Centipede
experiments is apparently not well equipped to be able to find a secret
underground lair — they keep having to move their facilities every few weeks,
when SHIELD busts up their latest laboratory. This is getting in the way of
letting the Three Guys achieve their full potential.

Emerson Poe is a mildly creepy villain — I like him
finishing his prison dinner while the Three Guys lay waste to the prison around
him — and he makes more of an impression than Raina has thus far. But this
Clairvoyant better be a heavy-hitter, is all I'm saying.

Steal from Nikita.
Please.

People keep writing articles, over and over, about how this
show needs to learn from Arrow. I've
seen that headline a billion times lately. To that, I have two responses: 1) Agents of SHIELD isn't that bad, just a
bit pedestrian.2) Really, this show
should be stealing like a motherfucker from Nikita,
The CW's spy show that's just wrapping up its final short season.

Nikita has done a
great job of handling the theme of spy professionals who have tangled
relationships, and secrets, and crazy missions, and spy-vs-spy, and all of
that.

The problem with Agents of SHIELD goes beyond the fact that
Skye is somewhat unenaging as a protagonist — I don't care about the secret of
her parents. But I also don't care about whatever secret Melinda May is hiding,
that's apparently related. Nor do I actually find myself caring that much about
whatever secret about Coulson caused him to be kidnapped at the end of this episode.

Spending more time on developing the relationships between
the characters in the here and now — such as May and Ward, or the curious
tangle between Fitz and Simmons (which made "FZZZT" the best episode
thus far) — would make us care more than dangling a dozen mysteries from the
past.